Oh Myyy! by George Takei Read Free Book Online

commonly accepted errors, and thus by the sheer weight of their misuse become simply commonly accepted. If you think I’m joking, witness how the chill-inducing and non-standard “irregardless” has crept into our speech, and even our prose, since the early twentieth century.
    And so the Grammar Nazis have assumed the thankless and wearying task of monitoring the hallways of the Internet, on the lookout for a missing “o” (“this is to cool”) or an extra “e” (“awe, that’s so great”).
    How many of you are cringing right now?
    One of my favorite sites on the Internet is grammarly.com. For lovers of English, this is a terrific place to peruse for good chuckles and equally satisfying head-shakers.
    My personal favorite is the misused pronominal form, as in “between you and I…” — a mistake that ironically occurs when people are trying to get it right. Then there is the tricky use of the gender neutral pronoun, made famous by Sting’s lyric, “If you love somebody, set them free.” I still haven’t gotten comfortable with that, though in the name of gender inclusiveness and non-awkward construction, I can see why we need to go this way. “If you love somebody, set him or her free” just doesn’t have the same resonance or cadence.
    Proper punctuation is also quite important. Missing commas can mean all the difference in the world:
     

     
    In the age of the Internet, where civil discourse frequently is reduced to a comment string on a Facebook post, the Grammar Nazis hold a decisive and rather unfair advantage. No matter how valid an opponent’s point, if it contains a spelling or grammatical error, that merits instant scorn and disqualification. “The phrase is not ‘myriad of ways’ but ‘myriad ways.’ No ‘of.’ If you had any real education, you would know that.”
    Indeed, grammar correction online assumes a role not unlike name-calling. “Your English is so atrocious I don’t feel the need to even respond” seems but a long-winded way of saying,
“Home-schooled dumbass.”
     

     
    Why precisely, though, are the Grammar Nazis so keen to find and correct other people’s errors? Are they fearful of the long and inevitable slide into linguistic relativism, where truth is measured solely by whether an idea has merit and not whether proper grammar is employed? I often wonder, when precisely did we concede that the rule-making was “done,” and that we would all abide by a common, if misguided, set of them? After all, at some point in time the ancestors of today’s Grammar Nazis huddled together in some dark room and set it all in stone. “Enough is enough,” they decreed. “These are the rules, and we’re sticking to them. Final answer. And while we’re at it, yes, we will spell ‘enough’ with an ‘ough’ instead of a ‘nuff.’ Deal with it.”
    The loss of the semicolon as a fixture in the English language is perhaps the most galling concession the Grammar Nazis must soon face. Future generations will not recognize it as punctuation to separate two related yet complete sentences; no, its function inevitably will be reduced to a “winky eye” to be paired commonly with its cousin, the smiley close parenthesis. ;)
    The Grammar Wars aren’t just about spelling, conjugation or punctuation. I once ignited a fierce online debate with the simple question of whether a sentence should have two spaces after each period, or just one. It turns out, the commonly held practice today is just one — though those of us who took typing in high school (yes, typing) are so accustomed to putting two spaces after a period as a concession to courier font that old habits are hard to break. So far, however, the Grammar Nazis haven’t gotten into the typesetting wars.
    I would observe, however, that the QWERTY keyboard that we are all now stuck using is fixed in our culture by the same kind of thinking that Grammar Nazis employ. That is, even though they know there is a better, more